World Champion Austria Start-up
Austrian start-up from Klagenfurt conquers the world Video streaming software provider Bitmovin is the technology leader in this field and full of enthusiasm.
Who is Bitmovin? Bitmovin was founded in 2013 by a group of students at Klagenfurt University: Stefan Lederer, today the CEO of Bitmovin, Christopher Müller and Christian Timmerer, both board members. The three of them researched and developed MPEG-DASH video streaming, an open-source technology, and quickly realised that their solutions were far superior to those offered by large corporations such as Apple or Microsoft, who also had their hand in the game. They filed a patent application for their improvements and implementations – today’s basis for all Bitmovin products. In just a few years, Bitmovin made it to Silicon Valley. In 2014, the business received subsidies from the AWS (Austrian Promotional Bank) and the KWF (Carinthian Business Support Fund) as well
as from investors such as Speedinvest or Constantia Industries. In 2015, Bitmovin was the first Austrian business ever to be accepted into the Y Combinator programme for start-ups and received 10.3 million US dollars. Investment fund Atomico is also among those who invested in the company, as is German TV giant RTL and other big players such as Zattoo and Bouygues Telecom. Today, Bitmovin is an award-winning leading provider of video infrastructure for global digital media companies and service providers. The company has been at the forefront of industry innovation and all major developments in the digital video streaming industry. Bitmovin built the world‘s first commercial adaptive streaming player and deployed the first software-defined encoding service that runs on any cloud platform. Its cloud-native technology offers the most flexible and scalable media encoding, playback, and analytics solutions available with unparalleled device reach, ease of integration, and world-class customer support. Bitmovin customers benefit from optimised operations, reduced time-to-market and the best viewer experience possible.
© Bitmovin
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ince the invention of television broadcasting in the 1900s, the broadcasting industry has always sought innovative technology that can improve the viewing experience for users. Over the years and with the introduction of over-thetop streaming services, the bar keeps rising as the industry continues to pack more visual quality into fixed spectrum and bandwidth allocations. More and more data is being streamed and video players are struggling with lag. Then Bitmovin came along. Bitmovin began as a spin-off of the University of Klagenfurt and has since morphed into Austria’s first start-up on its way to gaining unicorn status. The company offers products for high-efficiency streaming and the provision of multimedia data via the internet. It developed a cloud encoding service that processes high-quality videos without lag and which is up to 100 times faster than its competitors. Bitmovin is also offering a HTML5-based video player that is in high demand among video platforms, media and entertainment companies around the world – such as Ooyala, YouTube and Netflix in the United States, Technicolor in the United Kingdom and Flimmit in Austria.
Bitmovin founders Stefan Lederer, CEO and Christopher Müller, CTO
